Archive for the ‘Well Being’ Category

As we move through the holiday season towards the end of the year – and towards a new decade – consider this radical thought: the deeper the grief, the more the magnificence.

The holiday season is certainly a time to celebrate with loved ones, and it’s also a time of real stress for many. Plenty of negative triggers prompt people to become, well, less than they truly are. This stress is real. The seasonal triggers are real. And yet, if you see yourself following old patterns that just don’t work anymore, you can do something about it.

Ask yourself: Do I want to continue a (perhaps comfortably uncomfortable) poor me attitude or approach or experience real gratitude by looking deep inside, and all around me, for what’s warm and positive and true, too?

When you can suspend your negative thoughts, change old patterns to those that are new, healthy, and perhaps uncomfortable at first, you can and will be open to experience truecelebration.

Each and every moment is either grievance or miracle – and the beauty of this is YOU get to decide!

We all have regrets, each and every one of us. But, guess what? The past is the past – and we can’t un-ring the bell! The choice is accepting that what is….is! No matter what happens, accept the fact that the present moment is exactly as it should be, and, is a result of all actions leading up to it. This is a challenging concept for many of us to grasp. This doesn’t mean we agree or disagree in the moment.

Ask yourself – how long am I going to hang on to this story?

Take responsibility. Once you accept the moment for what it is, you own it! It’s your life, after all. Own every single piece of it, even if you didn’t invite it. You can only create new responses if you own the present moment.

When you fear or constrict you are working against the natural forces of the universe. Stop talking about it, churning on it, griping about it. Own it and you can create a new future. After all, what is accomplished if you spend time in blame, in negative, circular thought patterns? Nothing.

Why not instead view every person, situation, event, as your guide, your teacher. Ask what can you learn from each situation – and find the not-so-hidden gem once you free up your brain space from negative thought patterns. It’s amazing what can happen when you go here!

As I’m sure many of you discovered, certainly this past week, as long as you give you will receive. The more you give the more you receive. Deepak Chopra says that the more you practice giving, the easier it gets, and, interestingly enough, the more you practice receiving the easier that gets, too. (Some of us have a difficult time receiving gifts from others – compliments, a kind word or deed.)

Our true nature is affluent. And, today is “Pay it forward” day – a perfect time to practice giving without expectation to others. Pay for someone’s coffee, donate goods to someone in need, offer a kind word or assistance to a stranger – anything you have to offer is a perfect gift to another!

After the workshop with Deepak, I did commit (to myself) to give something to everyone with whom I come in contact. I silently wish strangers happiness, joy, and laughter, health, love, and wealth. Also, I committed to gratefully and graciously receive all gifts life has to offer me. Nature, sunlight, rain, snow, my daughter, my friends, my animals, my clients, the sounds of birds in song. Good health and material things like wealth, too. Why not?

Life is energy, and keeping that energy circulating is important so that it comes back to you. (What goes up must come down; what goes out must come back. It’s all flow. If you stop the flow, you interfere with nature’s good work.)

I felt pretty good leaving Deepak’s seminar, and wondered how I would do better in the world of giving and receiving. We learned much, much more about being in the moment, slowing down, trusting life. Right now, during this moment, I am so very grateful for the people in my life. I have a charmed and loving life, full of friends – people I care about and people who care about me. I am so very grateful to all of you who have stopped for a moment to meet me, share with me, love me. My wish for you is that all of your desires are fulfilled, effortlessly, spontaneously, lovingly.

Thank you for being in my life. Now, pay it forward today – and, all days! It’s easy and rewarding. Try it.

Life is too short to waste it on grievances. So why not take a difficult moment and turn it into a learning experience, and a true gift to share with others?

Many of you know that I have experienced problems with my back over the years – ruptured discs, aches, pains and much of it was caused from overuse and working out too hard, too often. Every time I think I am “super good to go” and I start a new exercise program or buy a new bike another injury occurs. This cycle has been truly frustrating and painful.

I find insight to so many questions in the most obscure places sometimes! This time I was sitting in an audience of 300, listening to Deepak Chopra talk about looking at everything as a gift. I hadn’t put those words in articulating my back problems over the years, but I did take some time to think about the gifts I have actually received from back pain. Yes! Gifts! The first time I ruptured a disc was very serious, of course, and I lost the use of my right leg and needed immediate surgery. I had just moved from Minneapolis to Portland, Oregon and knew no one. I had a 7-year old daughter to take care of. I had no choice but to call my father, a person who I knew of but did not truly know. He graciously and surprisingly got on an airplane and came to help.

This became the beginning of a very healing and beautiful relationship with my father. He visited about every 3 to 6 months for 10 to 15 years. It was an amazing gift! Who would have thought rupturing a disc and having surgery would turn my life in a positive direction? So, I began to look at all the times I injured something from working out too much or just being too busy to really pay attention to what I was doing to my body. When I was injured, I had to slow down or sit down, stopping altogether. As a result I made some of the best friends I have and I have the best career anyone could have. All rich gifts.

Last week, I was sitting in front of Deepak Chopra listening to many examples and stories about when we give we are also receiving and when we are receiving we are also giving. Seems so easy and obvious, doesn’t it? Through my injury and pain, my daughter and I both received a great relationship with my father. My father received total love and forgiveness from me. And we had so much fun being together and shared so many laughs along the way.

Becoming aware of gifts or blessings could be noticing a smile from a person or giving or receiving a compliment, or sharing a meal together. Every day now, I acknowledge a blessing or gift for the day.

Deepak says be appreciative of what’s happening in your life right now. This very minute have gratitude for what’s happening in your life and around you. Take time to quiet your mind and body to be open to receive this greatest of gifts. He suggested that any time you come into contact with anybody give them something. It doesn’t have to be material – it can be a flower, a compliment, a smile, or a prayer. The most powerful forms of giving are non-material, of course. The gifts of caring, attention, affection, appreciation, and love are some of the most precious gifts you can give and they don’t cost you anything.

This holiday season, open yourself up to others by giving and receiving.
Best to you all,
Diane

Those who want to secure pearls from the sea have to dive deep to fetch them. It does not help them to dabble among the shallow waves near the shore and say that the sea has no pearls and all stories about them are false. –Sai Baba

A curious concept, perhaps, for those of us who want a different life but don’t know how to go about making change in order to self actualize or to realize our dreams.

Maybe there will always be those people who believe in the struggle of life and little of anything else. When discussing dreams or plans or even struggles to move through, these people are usually the first to say “That’s impossible!” or “You can’t do that!”, or “Accept it, that’s just the way life is. You can’t change it.”

And, these are probably the very same people who are not willing to dive deep to fetch their pearls.

In years of coaching experience, I can confidently tell you that the most beautiful pearls are those you find at the depths of your soul. These gems are truly there waiting for you to find them.

Many of my clients read the book The Secret, and took its many lessons and advice. One such exercise noted in this material is to create a vision board, which many other practitioners use, too. It’s a simple exercise that asks you to list or create all your life goals in visual form on board, sometimes taking the form of a collage, sometimes taking the form of other creative visual lists, so you can look at it daily to allow time for serious reflection, enabling the images to lodge into your conscious (and subconscious) mind.

This book and its premise was amazing on many levels for millions of people, helping to change consciousness and raise awareness of areas often overlooked along the path of self development. But in my opinion, the creators forgot to provide folks with a few additional, critical steps to take in order for goals to actualize. Many of my clients were upset because they had been visualizing their goals for months to no avail. Nothing happened, and they became frustrated or deflated in thinking their goals could indeed be realized.

If you have had a lifetime of trauma and negative experiences, we now know that your brain has made pathways–a super-highway of pathways–for those negative experiences to remain active in the mind and in your pattern of thinking. (You’ve all heard me talk about this facet of neuroscience before.) In my experience, resolving these negative experiences with a coach or therapist is the first thing that has to happen in order to start moving your energy forward.

It was either Einstein (or Frank Zappa) who said that the mind is like a parachute, working best when it is open. Einstein also told us the imagination is more important than knowledge. Both ideas are important concepts, indeed.

Learning how to tap into your inner self or to dive deep into and beyond your (sub)conscious is quite a task, one that offers great rewards. Consistent, repeated focus on what you want will lead to spontaneous intuitive breakthroughs.

Remember, no matter who you think you are, you are always much more than that. When you learn to dive deep, you’ll find tremendous gifts.

I recently received two interesting requests from people who wanted to read more about improving “fast.” This is not an uncommon request, of course, as improving or changing fast seems to be a lot of what I hear on a daily basis. A far-fetched notion? Immediate gratification guaranteed?

It is possible to make significant improvements in a short period of time, but for improving or changing to last, well, repeatedness is the answer.

In my previous blogs, I have presented some interesting information about neuroscience and how spect scans are able to gauge or track that what you pay attention to creates muscle or a significant pathway in your brain. This superhighway of what you are paying attention to is critical conditioning. For example, if you are paying attention to “what if I panic?”, you can develop strong neurons for panicking. If you are focused on “what if I am totally confident?”, then you can develop strong neurons for confidence.

John Overdurf calls this scenario the Cycles of Observation. These Cycles of Observation can alone determine our reality through:
* the quantum zeno effect which, as you know, is how the duration and frequency of observation effects the rate of change in both objective and subjective terms.
* the relative detail, patterns, and/or progression that can be observed. Notice, for example how frequently you observe something or place your attention on something; how much time that observation/attention lasts;
where this attention starts and finishes (and/or does it?); what you pay attention to between observations; what meaning you make of it all; how you keep that meaning constant.

Whew! That’s A LOT of observing going on! But, it’s really important to pay attention to where your mind is, where the focus spends most of its time, and what patterns you might be creating that could be redirected towards something more positive.

Why not consider paying attention to something positive and repeat that multiple times?

Most of my clients aren’t seeing me because they are paying attention to something positive repeatedly – they are seeing me to resolve whatever pattern or story they are stuck in, the tape that stops them from creating and maintaining healthy patterns to create a healthy life and life choices.

In individual client sessions, I ask many questions on the first visit as many people have said there is no greater knowledge than knowledge of oneself.
What’s curious is that many people are oblivious to themselves and it’s others who know only certain aspects of their personalities. Remaining stuck in a state of darkness about ourselves keeps us stuck and prevents progress. Change is only possible where there is an element of awareness or consciousness present.

Defenses that are ingrained habits have to be resolved or worked through so we can picture and be ourselves as we really are. Only then is it possible to transform. This is when we are no longer ruled by circumstances but we become rulers of our circumstances.

This is where our lives truly change and become enriched.

Many of us stress during the summer months about how we look, which gets mixed up with how we feel, act, and think. Many of us, too, turn to food to feel better if we’re feeling down rather than dealing with the core issues that affect our thinking. If you’re caught in a yo-yo diet pattern, or are an emotional eater, using food as a drug to block your inner work, you can stop. In order to help you break unhealthy habits and get on track to a healthier you, learn a bit more about how food is affecting your body, mind, and soul.

Food as Drugs
Foods actually have a bigger effect and work faster on your body than drugs. For example, it takes several weeks for Prozac to build up in your system to increase the serotonin level in your brain. Sweets like chocolate or cinnamon rolls with frosting can increase the serotonin levels in your brain in just minutes. High-fat, high-sugar foods release natural opiates in the brain just like heroin. The only difference is the amount.

The problem with the use of food as a recreational drug is that it sets up a never-ending cycle. Depression and anxiety can cause people to eat to feel better, but mostly people end up feeling worse. When that happens, people start to eat again to feel better and the cycle is on. Weight gain, fatigue, and more depression are natural side effects of this vicious cycle.

Another common example of this cycle at work is when people blast their bodies with caffeine and sugar. When you ingest such powerful compounds, you’ll probably feel energized for a bit and then in a short while, you’ll feel tired and sluggish and need another caffeine or sugar blast. This cycle is quite difficult to break.

It is my opinion that no one will ever lose weight permanently until the emotional reasons for eating are resolved. Only then is it possible for people to learn to notice how food actually makes them feel – and can actually do something to develop healthy patterns that trump the negative.

Sugar
Hundreds of years ago, people ate no sugar. Heart disease, diabetes, and cancer can be traced to increases in sugar. These diseases were virtually nonexistent in primitive cultures. They begin to show up about 20 years after primitive cultures begin eating refined carbohydrates.

In his book Sweet and Dangerous, Dr. Yudkin sites numerous examples of many cultures where it was shown that sugar was a more likely cause of heart disease than fat. The Masai and Sumburu tribes of East Africa have almost no heart disease, yet they eat a diet high in fat (mostly meat, and milk, but no sugar).

And, there are plenty of health comparisons between Americans and other Western cultures, too, which you’re probably aware of. The French diet is higher in fat than the American diet. French people have lower rates of obesity and heart disease than Americans. The French eat approximately 5.5 times less sugar per capita than Americans.

Refined sugar has been stripped of all its nutrients and robs the body of its nutrients during the process of digestion. In order to digest and metabolize sugar, the body has to use its own mineral reserves of chromium, manganese, cobalt, copper, zinc, and magnesium.

Our bodies have not developed the ability to metabolize large amounts of sugar on a daily basis. When sugars or highly processed carbohydrates are eaten, they are digested almost immediately, and the flood of sugar is released directly into the bloodstream. In response to the increase in sugar, the pancreas secretes insulin. Known as the fat storage hormone, insulin is designed to restore blood sugar equilibrium by taking excess sugar out of the bloodstream and storing it in the muscle tissues or liver (called carbo-loading) or moving it into fat storage.

Sugar has been proven to destroy the germ killing ability of white blood cells for up to five hours after ingestion. Sugar reduces the production of antibodies, proteins that combine with inactive foreign invaders in the body. Sugar interferes with the transport of Vitamin C, one of the most important nutrients for all facets of immune function. Sugar causes mineral and enzyme deficiency and sometimes causes allergic reactions. It neutralizes the action of essential fatty acids, thus making cells more prone to invasion by all viruses and microorganisms. Also, cancer cells feed directly on sugar potentially stimulating tumor growth. During World War II, when sugar consumption declined, the number of cases of adult onset diabetes also dropped – sharply.

Break the Sugar Cycle
By all means, avoid sugar when you can. Choose food wisely. Make healthy meals together as a family and with friends. Exercise. Drink plenty of clean water and herbal teas. Eat fresh foods low in fats and sugars. Avoid bingeing and starvation diets. Plan meals carefully and you will find you have more energy to do the things you love with your loved ones. And, be sure to do the inner work necessary to discover your true reasons for poor eating habits you may have developed over a long period of time. When you deal with your emotional habits in a healthy way, you’ll feel better equipped to deal with your consumption habits, too.

There is a terrifically simple story told by many different workshop trainers featuring the town ‘fix it’ man. You know this man – he’s the old local who was known to be able to fix anything.

His story goes like this: In the middle of winter, the boiler in the elementary school would not work. Everything possible was tried in order to fix it so the kids would be warm while in class. Finally in desperation, the ‘fix it’ man was called to come in a look at the problem. After he was told about all the efforts that were made to fix the boiler, he walked to his toolbox, took out his hammer and walked back to the boiler. Then, without any warning, he took his hammer and tapped gently on a valve. Instantly the boiler started back up again and continued to run smoothly without hesitation. The ‘fix it’ man packed up and went home.

The school received a bill a week later from the ‘fix it’ man for $1000. They were of course taken aback, and referred the matter to the superintendent, who then phoned the ‘fix it’ man and asked for an itemized statement. How could he possibly have charged $1000 when all he did was tap his hammer once on a valve? When the itemized bill arrived, it noted very clearly that he charged $1.00 for the hammer tap and $999 for knowing exactly where to tap.

This is a perfectly simple example illustrating that it’s important to know what to change, where to change, and how to change.

Many of the folks I work with have tried to create changes in their lives by changing jobs, relationships, cars, locations, style, and many more elements of our seemingly complicated lives. It is fantastic to have knowledge that you need a change, but it is completely different to have the awareness that directs exactly what or how to change. (And, remember that John Overdurf reminds us that all we are is change. We are changing all the time. Evolution is good. Then, of course, there is the fear of change. But that’s a different story.)

The best way to change your mind is by changing your negative thought patterns. We can see with scans that whatever our mind pays attention to actually creates a super highway of neurons and dendrites to support those thoughts, positive or negative. The mind doesn’t discriminate here.

Stop and assess for a minute. Are you paying attention to anxiety? Fear? Why not change your mind and add a positive force to your life?

Wouldn’t it be much better to pay attention to possibilities rather than focusing on deficits? What could be and what is rather than what is not?

Your mind uses thoughts to create the way in which you interact with reality. Your thoughts can be used to build or destroy. They are powerful.

People from all areas of life who are ready to acknowledge that life involves problems and are willing and ready to get busy to do the hard work collaborate with me to help create solutions and permanent positive change. Working together, my clients learn to recognize their thoughts or pictures they are making as a powerful force for change and how to use them to create the future they desire. The kids I work with are especially quick to get this technique and use it to their advantage.

Acknowledge the storm
Your mind can be like a wild, out of control storm. It will do what it has rehearsed or has always done which is often not what you intend. If you are spending a lot of your energy just trying to control the storm, how much does that energy really benefit you overall? How can you change the comforting pattern of doing (or thinking) the same thing over and over again? (Hint: you can’t.)

The mind—our monkey mind, as one trainer calls it—jumps all over the place. One thought leads to another and soon we’ve forgotten our original goal. The question is, how do we tame the mind? One way is to develop possibility thinking. I know, I know. Many of us have gone to every workshop or Tony Robbins training, or read every book or watched the Secret many times, and still we think we haven’t been able to control our thinking.

All the information learned from these sources is helpful, however, if you haven’t gotten your life under control or in a place that is suitable or comfortable to you, it may be that you have had a lot of negative circumstances or situations in life that haven’t been resolved. If you have taken one or two seminars or trainings in positive thinking and 30 years of anxiety or depression or trauma, what do you think is going to win? What is your brain paying attention to—the superhighway of negativity or the one-day of positive training?

In working with individuals or in teams via my workshops, I always discover that folks wouldn’t even be seeking me out if they were able to consciously change their thinking or behaviors. And also with advances in neuroscience, we know we have to change the negative superhighway that is actually now observed and recorded in the brain.

There are many factors that prevent people from achieving their full potential. Fear is the biggest deterrent I see. It comes in many shapes, forms, and sizes. Fear paralyzes and destroys. It can creep into the deepest core of human potential and freeze creativity. Then it can generalize and get rooted in and through thoughts and action.

It is my life’s purpose to help as many people as I can to embrace change. The current wisdom truly is all we are is changing. By embracing personal growth and making life a true adventure offers an awakening of your full and total potential. Getting unstuck from anything negative and moving towards and bright exciting future by shaking old beliefs loose to develop your unique self is empowering.

Ask yourself , how would your life improve if you could focus on what you want? What is your higher purpose? The only limits I see are if you are committed to staying stuck in your old thoughts and beliefs and thus patterns. There are many ways to change. You can start by realizing you are far more than you think you are and may have been led to believe.

Ready to move forward?

For many of us, basic needs were not met when we were children. For many, still, our basic needs are not being met as adults. In order to evolve and self actualize, to unlock our true potential, we’ve probably got to do some serious inner work.

Remember that Maslow believed that educators should respond to the potential an individual has for growing into a self actualized being. If we were all taught to recognize our potential from our earliest years, we could achieve just about anything. The following list provides some keys to unlocking potential in us all, and speaks to the educator in all of us.

1. Teach people to be authentic, to be aware of their inner selves, and to hear their inner feelings and internal voices.
2. Teach people to transcend their cultural conditioning and become world citizens.
3. Help people discover their vocation for life, their calling, fate, or destiny. (This is especially focused on finding the right career and right mate.)
4. Teach people that life is precious, that there is joy to be experienced in life. If people are open to seeing the good in all sorts of situations, life can certainly be viewed as worth living.
5. We must accept people as they are, and help them learn their inner nature.
6. Help assist others in securing their basic needs. This includes safety, belongingness, and esteem needs.
7. Refresh true consciousness by teaching people to appreciate beauty and other positive forces in nature and in life.
8. It takes control to improve quality of life in all areas. (Controls and boundaries are helpful to achieving goals, while complete abandon in this regard might not necessarily help evolution.)
9. Teach people to transcend trifling issues. Assist them in approaching serious problems in life including suffering, pain, death, injustice.
10. Become a good chooser. Practice making good choices.

Think what a fabulous planet (world, community, home) we could create if we were all focused on unleashing our true human potential!